Toilet seats are a common cause of irritation in households where men and women share a bathroom equipped with a toilet fixture. Men must raise the toilet seat in order to use the toilet for urination. Women, however, use the toilet seat in its lowered position. Women are, therefore, often frustrated by finding the toilet seat in a raised position. This experience can be particularly frustrating and potentially hazardous when someone attempts to use the toilet in a sitting position in a dark or poorly lit room.
Considerable inventive ingenuity has been directed towards the development of apparatus for either closing toilet seats automatically and/or damping the descent of a toilet seat so that it closes without noise or damage to the seat or the toilet bowl.
Much of the prior art relates to bulky apparatus which clutters the toilet area with cylinders, electrical wires, hoses or other paraphernalia used to control the opening and/or closing of the seat or lid. Such paraphernalia is not only unattractive and difficult to clean, it can also represent a hazard which can potentially cause accidental tripping and the like.
More aesthetic and compact mechanisms for damping the closure of a toilet seat or automatically closing and damping the closure of a toilet seat have also been invented. One such mechanism is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,153,946 which issued Oct. 13, 1992 to Yoke et al. This patent is entitled APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR AUTOMATICALLY CLOSING A TOILET BOWL LID AND SEAT and describes an apparatus that includes a control mechanism engageable with a toilet bowl lid for locking the lid in the open position after the lid is pivoted to the open position, and a timer mechanism for actuating the control mechanism to release the lid from the open position after a predetermined time interval. The timer mechanism is suspended while at least a predetermined weight is applied to the seat in a lowered position. The apparatus further includes a damper mechanism to retard the descent of the lid after the lid is urged to the closed position by the action of a coil spring when the predetermined time interval has expired.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,193,228 which issued Mar. 16, 1993 to Murasawa et al is entitled TOILET COVERING HINGE ASSEMBLY WITH DAMPING CAPABILITY. This patent describes a hinge assembly for a toilet cover designed to dampen the motion of a toilet cover when it is moved from a raised to a lowered position. The assembly includes a hinge shaft connecting the toilet cover to the rear of the toilet so that it is rotatable together with the toilet cover between the lowered and raised positions. Connected to the hinge shaft is a dashpot which is secured on the side of the toilet and includes a cylinder containing a volume of damper fluid and a rotor rotatably received within the cylinder. The rotor receives the hinge shaft to be rotatable together therewith and is provided with a flap extending outwardly into the damper fluid. The flap is pivotable relative to the rotor so that the flap is caused to pivot to a folded condition when the seat cover is raised so that there is substantially no resistance to the upward movement of the cover. When the cover is manually released from an open position, however, the flap pivots to an unfolded position and resists movement of the damper fluid so that the cover descends slowly to the closed position.
The shortcoming in each of these apparatus is that although both mechanisms are relatively unobtrusive and aesthetic in their appearance, neither mechanism appears to accommodate a manual override of the damper mechanism to permit a forced lowering of a toilet seat. Emergency situations arise wherein use of a toilet becomes urgent. In such situations, if a toilet seat is open or only partially closed, it is not necessarily practical or possible to wait until the seat descends to a fully lowered position, which generally takes half a minute or so. Since no provision is made for forcibly closing the seats described above, a forced closure could damage the damper mechanism and/or the toilet seat or hinge assembly. A severe increase in fluid pressure created by a manual override of the damper mechanism could also damage the seals and/or the flap valve in these mechanisms.